Searching is no longer “Googling”. The verb that looks great in conversations where you want to sound modern has come to condemn you as an online dinosaur. If you use it you’re a Boomer. Searching on Google is no longer possible. Search social networks. Let them explain this to Generation Z.

Young people in China no longer ask questions about Baidu. They state this on Huxiu (something like China’s TechCrunch). There, they state that if a young Chinese person wants to fix a socket, they will look for the answer on the Chinese Instagram Xiaoshongshu. If they need recommendations on places to eat, they go to Douyin (TikTok’s name in mainland China and Hong Kong). And if they want to analyze a document, they bypass Google, Gemini or ChatGPT because Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot AI has a chatbot, Kimi.

Source: eMarketer

Traditional search engine left in the background. China’s Generation Z paraphrased: social networks win. The hyperlink list is dead, because the results now need to be much more visual: Short video is king.

And the same thing happens in the rest of the world. Young people are increasingly using social networks as search engines, as an eMarketer chart based on data from consulting firm GWI Core shows. In 2016, 41% of Gen Z members did this. By 2023, this rate has increased to 51% and the upward trend is clear.

many reasons. According to the data, this is because social media helps them access the information they want faster. Not only that: These results look more relevant, more visual, and more entertaining. Traditional search engines are slow and boring in the eyes of Generation Z.

Using Google on mobile devices is not practical. Huxiu points out another possible reason for this preference for social networks: They are more practical because they were created to be used directly on mobile phones, something for which Google is increasingly criticized and whose interface is not very useful.

The search for places to visit in China’s Lantian region is very different in Baidu (left) and Xiaohongshu (right). While text results contain advertisements, visual results contain more interesting and useful information.

And advertising on top of that. On Baidu, young people complain that not much useful information is displayed as search results on the mobile screen. Advertising often makes valid results even more inaccessible, and the same thing happens with Google. The traditional search engine has more room to maneuver on a desktop PC or laptop, but its validity may be compromised, at least in terms of urgency.

When it was trendy to search on Google. For those of us with gray hair, of course this creates an offside effect. The Oxford English Dictionary included “google” as a verb in June 2006. We could already type in Google, or rather we could not use Google, because this spelling was never accepted in Spanish. For years, Google’s dominance of the search market has been absolutely imperial, and although it remains the search engine with the largest market share, its competitors are no longer other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, but social networks.

TikTok, recommend me a good restaurant. This is also proven by recent studies focusing on the aforementioned Generation Z. In Fortune magazine, for example, they cited an example from consulting firm Bernstein Research, where they emphasized that “young audiences are ‘searching,’ not ‘Googling.'” They are increasingly targeting social networks like TikTok for restaurant recommendations, driving purchases “They go directly to aggregators like Amazon to do their homework, and they turn to prolific AI search engines like ChatGPT to do their homework.”

Google is no longer an oracle. An April 2024 survey by Forbes Advisor and Talker Research polled 2,000 people in the United States. The results were clear: 45% of respondents from ‘Gen Z’ were more likely to use “social search” on sites like TikTok or Instagram rather than Google. In the case of millennials, this falls to 35%, in the case of ‘Generation X’ the figure is 20% and in the case of ‘boomers’ it is 10%. As Mark Shmulik of Bernstein Research puts it, “this is second nature to users [Gen Z] It’s going straight to the source.”

Google is raising dwarfs. Therefore, Google’s future seems to be threatened by more and more parties. Users are starting to turn to ChatGPT and other chatbots instead of Google to find answers to their questions; but now the risk also lies with other searches that previously appeared to be Google’s exclusive preserve and are now increasingly being answered on social networks. Like TikTok, Instagram… or Xiaoshongshu.

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